For Bus Ride, Parks Collects New Honor

Rosa Parks, 84, who took the most famous bus ride in U.S. history, was honored in Washington by the American Public Transit Association on Wednesday with its first lifetime achievement award.

"It is because she chose to sit where she sat that I can stand where I stand," said Gordon J. Linton, head of the Federal Transit Administration. Parks was honored for her refusal on Dec. 1, 1955, to surrender her seat on a segregated Montgomery, Ala., city bus to a white passenger as the law required.

Her arrest sparked a yearlong boycott of Montgomery buses by blacks that propelled the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. into prominence.